NASCAR followed through on its intention to throw a caution flag on the final lap of the Cup Series race [at Atlanta] to keep drivers from racing through a crash scene.
The issue arose after the Saturday night Xfinity Series race at Atlanta Motor Speedway when NASCAR held the caution. As a crash occurred off Turn 2 in the middle of the pack, the leaders raced back to the finish. It was a decision that NASCAR senior vice president of competition Elton Sawyer labeled as “a little aggressive” and said that the caution should have been thrown.
On Sunday morning, it was addressed in the Cup Series driver’s meeting. Sawyer reassured them the field would not be put in a position to race through a debris field and the caution would come out if a similar incident to what was seen in the Xfinity Series race occurred.
It did. A crash Sunday night started mid-pack on the backstretch and the caution flew. It froze the leaders as they were three-wide in Turns 3 and 4.
“If we don’t throw the caution, you’re incentivizing the competitors to drive through that,” Sawyer told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “So, if you look back over the last week or so and nine superspeedway races that we’ve had if you count the duels and ARCA race … everybody is on top of each other, so the element of a last lap caution is there, as we’ve seen. It’s on the sanctioning body to make sure that we do our absolute best to get to the start/finish line under green, but there is conditions and situations where we need to throw that. And we’re going to err more on throwing it than not.”
There has not been backlash from the garage over the decision. The reason it was brought up Sunday was that drivers wanted NASCAR to throw the caution flag, and felt they should have done so on Saturday night.
— Racer —